Electronic commerce (or e-commerce) has grown increasingly popular over the years. The Internet has not only made online shopping easier for e-shoppers/users, but has also helped various e-marketers and e-retailers to gain business by reaching a larger pool of people. However, with increase in competition amongst the e-retailers, it has become quite important to understand the need and intent of the e-shoppers. Identifying the need and behavior of the e-shoppers provides a better understanding of online shopper's personality and their shopping trend that in turn provides better shopper-centric recommendation and enables the e-retailers to gain profit.
Various approaches are known in the art for identifying and analyzing behavior of the online shoppers in order to provide product recommendations to the shoppers. These include the techniques based on browsing history and demographic data of the shoppers, and segmentation-techniques that generally identify behavior of online shoppers or users participating in the online shopping activities.
Some existing solutions exhibit content-based recommendations where a shopper is recommended buying items similar to the items purchased or preferred by her in the past. Other existing solutions exhibit collaborative filtering, where a shopper is recommended buying items similar to the items purchased or preferred by other people in the past in a similar fashion. The content-based recommendations and the collaborative filtering techniques help in analyzing shopping patterns of the shoppers to identify shoppers' personalities. However, the existing solutions fail to perform a complete analysis of shoppers' personalities and therefore only limited characteristics of the shoppers can be identified with respect to his/her shopping capabilities. The actual need and intent of the shoppers is not identified by the existing solutions known in the state of art.
In light of the above, there is a need for a system and method to identify the actual need and intent of online shoppers/users. Further, there is a need for a system and method to identify and monitor complex and dynamic behavior of online shoppers. Furthermore, there is a need for a system and method to identify and implement persona-centric persuasion techniques that can be implemented in the field of e-commerce to motivate online users to shop.